Groupon - Design System Refresh

Responsibilities

• Refresh the design system and restructure its fractured component libraries.
• Establish governance the whole design unit would actually follow.
• Redesign the deal page (their primary point-of-sale funnel) with the new system.

The inconsistency compounded in two directions. Device-based differences meant iOS, Android, tablet, mobile web and desktop web had all drifted apart; geographically separated teams then multiplied that effect. As an external resource with no allegiance to any one team, my job was to analyse the conflicting libraries objectively and produce a standardised approach which designers could use when creating or updating components. Just as importantly, it meant getting teams collaborating who had spent years not doing so.

I defined shared vocabulary before presenting any findings: three types of "source of truth" that feed into each other, so every team contributed from the same definitions and data.

The evidence then grouped into three failure behaviours:

• No design-system syncing: product files ran on local, unofficial styles.
• Poor product-component management: old initiative files were serving as de-facto component libraries.
• Unsustainable practices: reusing old files for new initiatives, teams working in silos, and no governance model for approving new components.

Each pattern was paired with a root-cause analysis, so the recommendations that followed addressed the cause rather than the symptom.

Every rule mapped onto something the audit had evidenced. Where there was no dedicated product-level library, the playbook defined one as the base layer for a source of truth. Where nobody owned components, it created governance models via a Product Library Owner role with explicit responsibilities: the library file itself, the contact point for additions, version control, and communicating updates back out to the team. The biggest shift was moving from a project-based file structure to a status-based one (Official Screens, In Progress, and Approved), so approved deliverables get reused and pushed to the live build rather than recreated and repurposed. The second half of the output is procedural, taking a designer from folder setup to a published library, so the standard was something people could execute rather than just agree with.

A competitor analysis phase opened the work up, looking at platforms with comparable flows and features and folding the better patterns into the page. From there the redesign became a feedback loop: building a real, revenue-critical surface out of the new components exposed the gaps in them, which refined the system further. The result is a template rather than a page. The same body modules (hero carousel, highlights, reviews, merchant map) stack consistently across every deal type and platform, while the offer column adapts to what is actually being sold. That gave designers a worked example to build from, and gave me a concrete way to demonstrate the new system and its governance model to the wider design team.